Towards Achieving Organizational Agility in Software Development: Identifying Issues and Organizational Alignment Strategies

Despite the popularity of agile software development and the existence of agile frameworks that provide methodological support for conducting development projects, companies still often lack an understanding of the changes necessary to achieve organizational agility. This poses the risk that the benefits of agile software development cannot be fully exploited. Building upon Socio-Technical Systems (STS) Theory as analytical lens and the results of 13 semi-structured expert interviews, we identify 13 organizational issues that occur frequently in agile software development. We assign them to categories considering the involved people, technologies, tasks, and structures as constituents of STS, as well as the relationships between them. The resulting scheme of issues provides numerous avenues for the development of additional organizational support that goes beyond the scope of existing agile frameworks. Contributing to this goal, we derive three practical strategies to improve the alignment between the constituents of development organizations from the interviews.